Big Blue Ocean

Just as the Boeing 767 began its gradual descent to the cerulean blue sea surrounding Oahu, a dozen babies began to scream, first just one and then all the others taking up the squalling chorus.  They had been peaceful little travelers up until then, but the descent triggered a group howl.  Then, as soon as we were about 500 feet above the ground, on final approach to the runway, they all stopped and peace reigned once again.

Flying to the islands is a bit of a miraculous undertaking for those of us who do not have any aeronautical skills.  Setting off from the San Jose airport, you arc and circle to the west and then leap once and for all into the blue beyond.  It feels like leaping off a high dive when you're a kid, but you don't land for another five hours or more.  You're flying at oh, 400 mph or so, I guess, and Hawaii is only half way across the vast blue expanse of water, at best.  It's the biggest thing there is on our earth, the Pacific Ocean is.  There's a lot we still don't know about it, but that's an odd statement, isn't it.  How do you know how much you don't know?  How do you know how big an ocean is unless you fly over it and never get to the other side of it?  You can tell me numbers all day long about depth, temperature, volume and the like, but the damned thing is just huge and that's all there is to that.  It is and you feel like a mote next to it.

Perhaps the babies knew collectively that what we had just accomplished was so stunning that they could only scream in amazement.  I'd like to think so.  They were like primitive tribespeople dancing around in front of the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The pilot and his crew who took on the task did a fine job and we landed safely, ready to have ourselves a nice Hawaiian holiday for the next two weeks.  The crew didn't pay much attention to the fact that 200 people had waddled into their big white bird and waddled out again after five hours, that they'd shot through the heavens in search of a cluster of small islands in the middle of the biggest ocean in the known universe.  But I did, and I am in awe.  

Monterey: Squid Boats at Night

Every night, fishing boats rumble and creak out of the harbor, sounding echoing pings to locate schools of bass or salmon or squid.  Then, encircling a roiling churn of fish, they cast their nets and wait.  Men gaze at the oily black water.  At night, intense white lights lure masses of squid upward, the sea's deer in headlights.  Seeing the shimmering blaze above them, squid swarm into the nets cast in wide circles.  They dart, peer with strange eyes in bizarre bodies, hunters hunted.  Night after night, the lights glow silently, a bright stadium of 20 or more boats, a deadly game thrown into sharp relief.

It's quiet when you stand on shore and watch, picturesque and quaint to passersby.  When the fog settles down low, the boat lights form halos on the underbelly of the cold gray mist.  The glow is beautifully sinister, otherwordly in its attractive force, both to people and sea creatures.

Ghostly and strange buoy bells clang forlornly on the rocking swell.  Low waves send a stinking salt mist laden with kelp and fish and guano up and away, as if it were the rank perfume of ocean flowers.

How strange this scene, and how stark the visible kill of sea life so we can eat.  Not like distant slaughterhouses far from our view, the ocean is immediate, cold and embodies the plain reality of life and death.

Watching Ocean Waves

When you walk on the beach, you decline rapidly in importance while the whole of nature sizes you up, admits you back into its wild sanctum and then leaves you in the company of molted feathers, bits of shells and diffident sand crabs.  How can you feel large among a trillion grains of sand and unending waves tormenting the shore?  You are a dot, a mote, a sniggle of energy surrounded in every direction by immensity and a perfection of irrational power.

Stay upright and keep your footing while the ocean snarls and tumbles in from the far curved horizon and tears cliffs apart.  Yell and scream all you want, but your voice is a squeak in comparison, a muffled, swallowed-in-the-roar-of-eternal-sound insignificance.

You are only so high, so strong, so resistant to death at the beach.  You are a flea, a tease on the surface of the sand whose footprints are erased, removed with decisive and randomly sweeping vigor.  As mighty as you may feel, your mightiness is a small snack gulped into the roaring, salted wetness of the cold ocean's fathoms.  It will not last long, your ill temper and pride.  It is worthless in the reality of a restless tide that heaves and slaps without thought or consideration of what your mother thought so precious about you.

Waves of energy, humping and rolling Samurai mountains, move and team with other waves and cross paths with still others, and they would move to the other side of infinity, but somewhere a shore interrupts them, a collision cascades everywhere, then breaks into another infinity of ripples and agonies of splashes.  Or are they joys?  None of them can care.  They go on, indifferently, splendidly, and on forever.

All your life long there is the ocean banging, slapping and jostling everything it touches.  It stinks, it's gorgeous and it pulls back and forth, hearts and souls, beating, pulsing, washing and always restless.  Go to the ocean and be small, unuseful, aimless, inarticulate.  It may save you from yourself just when you are getting to feel you are so fine, so important, and so perfectly unique in the universe.  Ha!

Pacific Grove Suffers For You

I just looked outside and noticed the fog was a shade brighter than it has been for the past few days.  This is cause for joyous celebration, so I am going to take a walk.  But first, I'm adding a few splashes of color to this page just in case the brightness fades and Pacific Grove is plunged back into colder shades of foggy gloom.

I suffer for you, you readers who live in roasting hot climates, but I also envy you sometimes.  I know what it's like to shade all windows in the middle of the day, turn on fans, keep plenty of ice on hand for cool drinks.  I have lived in places that felt like I was living in a pizza oven, sort of, and kept me flattened to cool walls or begging for a nice cool swim.

Because of your climate, I have mine.  The Pacific Ocean is massively huge and deep, and very cold.  Our fair beaches boast an average water temperature of about 54 degrees Fahrenheit or colder most of the year.  One dash into that cold and you are sure to come screaming out again with blue lips and goose bumps all over your body.

When your day heats up into triple digits, the air where you are rises - usually - and creates a low-pressure vacuum that pulls our cold air inland to you.  Because you are feeling like a melted blob of gum on the pavement when you go outdoors, I feel like a popsicle when I step outside here.

So, with numbed, stiffened fingers, I sit here at the only warmth in the house, the keyboard of my Macbook.  I am literally wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, jeans and multiple warm layers of things on my feet.  And I'm still cold.  It's this way every year here in the Groove.  So it's fogburns for us in order that you may have a somewhat cooler breeze where you are.  When your area cools down later in the year, it will be wonderful here at last and we can have a leftover summer.  We accept it; we are stoic and love fleece, wool, and down.  It's part of being in the groove, shuffling along to the beat of a really cold drummer.

Sigh. There went the brightness, just now.  And I'm ready to go for a walk so I can warm up for a while in the middle of July.  Let's see, where are my mittens and hat.....

Warm and Charming in a Cold Ocean

It's cold enough to snow outside.  It never snows here because it's too warm, even when it's cold.  That is, it's just cold enough to squawk about how uncomfortable you are, how your feet and ankles feel like uncoordinated stumps of wood and your lips won't move much when you try to speak.  But, it's too warm to show proof to your friends by waving photos of your frozen self up to your knees in slushy snow or standing next to icicles.  The ocean looks great no matter what, and when friends see our cold ocean photographed in winter, they say, "Oh, it looks so pretty.  Sure wish I was there."

I guess it goes to show that even a near-death experience can be a thing of beauty.  It was 49 degrees at 7:30 this morning, the ocean was 51, and, with the wind-chill factor figured in, it felt like 20 below or something in the freeze-your-chichis-off range.  The sunlight, beaming in thin slivers through the gathering clouds overhead, glanced off the restless surface of the sea and looked like tinfoil.  Or shiny chrome.

Because I knew how cold the water is, I wasn't very enamored of its chrome-like glitter.  They say familiarity breeds contempt.  I have no contempt for the Pacific, but I do have tons of respect for it.

Which brings me to sea otters, those cute little furry wonders of the ocean that charm the pants off of everyone who sees them.  They aren't actually fat, not like seals, sea lions and other big ocean-dwelling creatures are.  Instead, they're incredibly furry, wrapped from head to toe in the densest fur imaginable.  They spend a large portion of their time grooming oil and air bubbles into their coats so they can remain water repellent.  And they eat and eat and eat, bringing up shellfish from the rocky ocean bottom to bash open with rocks also hauled up from below.

Sea otters float around on their backs, looking nonchalant on imaginary chaise lounges, waving at tourists, grooming their fur, whacking shells on rocks on their bellies.  You see them, nonplussed, riding up and down in storm swells, ducking through cresting waves, thriving in the cold water like you or I do on our living room recliners.  At Pt. Lobos, famous for many reasons now but known in whaling days for a harbor where blubber was rendered, you can stroke a sea otter pelt on display and learn about the differences between otters and seals.  The fur is soft, plush and nearly impossible to part down to the skin.  It has a thousand hairs per square inch.  Just for fun, count the number of hairs on a square inch of your arm.  Not such a big number in comparison.

The mean glitter of the ocean at dawn today warned of cold, so I heeded the signs and stayed dry.  I saw an otter foraging, a sea lion cruising the shoreline and peering over at me as it swam slowly by.  Gulls, cormorants, grebes, and pigeons sailed or perched on high rocks and outcroppings, high and dry.  Down below them, the otter charmed one and all with its ability to thrive in the freezing water.  I'm always tempted to wave at them, but they're too busy staying warm to notice the likes of me.